"KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality."

"the fact that KDE can now work with a lower OpenGL requirement puts it far ahead of other environments (including OSX).

It really depends on how you look at it. Sure, it can run on mobile devices better than before, but then again, on desktop computers it's limiting itself to a seriously outdated feature set and could reap some nice performance boost with more modern feature set in use. This obviously begs two questions: are there really many mobile devices which can even run full KDE experience yet only provides OpenGL ES, and would it be possible to support both OpenGL ES for mobiles for compatibility AND the full-blown OpenGL spec for more capable devices for better performance? "

"The Compositor received a new OpenGL compositor based on OpenGL 2.x or OpenGL ES 2.0. Our default rendering nowadays uses the programmable pipeline instead of fixed functionality as in 4.6. In order to support the programmable pipeline quite some parts had to be rewritten and got optimized at the same time. Overall this brings a vast performance improvement for all users. From my experience this can even be increased when using the OpenGL ES 2.0/EGL backend"